AFP | Donald Trump may have managed to unilaterally reject a global climate pact, but the United States president faces uphill battles to achieve his legislative priorities, with Congress consumed by division and distracted by Russian Federation probes and looming fiscal deadlines.
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In the opening months, he has learned how little control he has over Congress, even when its two chambers are led by his own Republican Party.
Senators this week are expected to be presented with options for a new healthcare program they hope will be more acceptable to voters than one passed by the House.
He also urged members to back raising the debt ceiling without any conditions attached. Doing so would avert a disastrous, first-ever default on USA obligations.
In addition, they recently were informed by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that they will have to raise the federal government’s borrowing limit before August, a daunting task ripe for brinkmanship. Lawmakers once thought they had until the fall to act.
The letter said the USA bishops “stand ready to work with Congress” to address problems with the current health care law “in ways that protect the most vulnerable among us”.
Some conservatives, including White House budget director Mick Mulvaney and the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, want difficult spending cuts paired with the higher cap.
GOP leaders believe the tax increase has a better chance of passing if it is tied to school funding.
President Donald Trump will meet with House and Senate leadership at the White House Tuesday afternoon to plot a path forward on health care and tax reform – two of the administration’s top legislative priorities that have been stalled in recent months amid a growing investigation into Trump associates’ ties to Russian Federation. The CBO estimates that states that are home to half the USA population would do that, and that the effect would be to raise the cost of coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, in some cases considerably.
While a vote is not in sight, multiple aides close to the negotiations say that senators are acting in good faith and that everyone wants to get to “yes” on a bill – they just have no idea what that bill looks like.
But GOP leaders in the House have struggled to build support for tax proposals.
The lone Democrat who voted against it, Sen. Democrats opposed the tactic. A major battle again looms over money for Trump’s oft-promised wall along the Mexican border.
At the end of its regular two-month session in early April, the Republican-controlled Legislature adopted a $4.1 billion general revenue budget that Justice vetoed, saying it would cut too deeply into state support for Medicaid, higher education and some other programs to close a projected $500 million funding deficit in the coming year.
The Republican majority House passed a bill in early May that repeals and replaces key provisions of ObamaCare, which many Republican lawmakers have vowed to repeal.
The bishops said that if the Senate uses the American Health Care Act as its starting point, they should “retain the positive elements of the bill and remedy its grave deficiencies”.
Both House and Senate budget committees have been working on their own fiscal blueprint.
That resolution would allow for follow-up legislation on taxes and spending, including a recommended cap on annual appropriations bills.
“Big meeting today with Republican leadership concerning Tax Cuts and Healthcare”.
Some defense stalwarts are demanding Pentagon increases greater than Trump’s, and the White House is pushing lower spending for domestic agency operations.
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Such duplicity! People with pre-existing conditions can not be denied coverage outright but, as the Congressional Budget Office just reported, many of them would face huge increases in the cost.
